This week’s Feedback column (that I write) in New Scientist magazine has three segments. Here are bits of each of them: Flowery polymorphic perversion — … Grażyna Gajewska at Adam Mickiewicz University in Poland is one of the few academics who is now overtly studying polymorphic perversion on a broad, societal level. Her recent treatise “Polymorphic perversion […]
“Frozen Meat Against COVID-19 Misinformation: An Analysis of Steak-Umm and Positive Expectancy Violations” [by Ekaterina Bogomoletc and Nicole M. Lee, Journal of Business and Technical Communication, vol. 35, no. 1, 2021, pp. 118-125.] is a featured study in “Pandemic Dining: Gelato, Candy, Lettuce, Frozen Meat“, which is a featured article in the special Viruses and […]
If someone has a hunk of meat stuck in their throat, should you advise them to drink a mouthful of hot coffee to dislodge the meat? This study suggests an answer to that question. “Esophageal Hematoma Associated with the Bolus Ingestion of Hot Coffee,” Yorinari Ochiai, Daisuke Kikuchi, and Shu Hoteya, Internal Medicine, epub 2020. […]
Scholars begin to try to make sense of the vexed year 2020, in this study: “Frozen Meat Against COVID-19 Misinformation: An Analysis of Steak-Umm and Positive Expectancy Violations,” Ekaterina Bogomoletc, Nicole M. Lee, Journal of Business and Technical Communication, epub 2020. (Thanks to Faye Flam for bringing this to our attention.) The authors, at North […]
(1) Loading some EpiPens (the little injection devices many people use to treat a bad allergic reaction) into washing machines, and then (2) washing them, and then (3) firing those washing-machine-washed EpiPens into hunks of meat was the basis for an experiment. Details are in the study: “The Effects of Washing on EpiPen Epinephrine Auto-injector […]
The headline in the Los Angeles Times reads “Teen baked her grandfather’s ashes into sugar cookies and brought them to school, police say.” Does this count as cannibalism? The question arises because one month ago the 2018 Ig Nobel Prize for nutrition was awarded to James Cole of the University of Brighton, for calculating that the […]
The All-Meat Diet was fictional when it was the centerpiece of “The Atkins Diet Opera” in 2004. Now someone is promoting the All-Meat Diet as a real diet for real people to follow. That someone is Mikhaila Peterson. Stephanie Lee reports, in Buzzfeed: Mikhaila Peterson, 26, is now making money off a new kind of […]
Promise and ontological ambiguity in the in vitro meat imagescape is focus of a newly published study called “Promise and Ontological Ambiguity in the In vitro Meat Imagescape.” The study is: “Promise and Ontological Ambiguity in the In vitro Meat Imagescape: From Laboratory Myotubes to the Cultured Burger,” Neil Stephens and Martin Ruivenkamp, Science as Culture, […]
Mark A Jobling [pictured here] of the University of Leicester writes about the genetic underpinnings of exotic meats. His essay, called “Flogging a dead horse“, appears in the journal Investigative Genetics [2013, 4:5]: People eat mules, as well as donkeys and horses, and in meat contamination testing, mule meat would appear to be horsemeat, because of the […]
Although you might think (as many have) that dogs have a strong preference for eating meat, things may not be quite so clearcut. Authors Anandarup Bhadra and Anindita Bhadra of The Dog Lab (doggedly observing dogs at the Department of Biological Sciences, Indian Institute of Science Education and Research, Kolkata, India), propose instead that dogs’ […]